San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Newmuseum trips light fantastic
HOUSTON — A spectacular show of light and form awaits visitors at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s new Nancy and Rich Kinder Building.
Architect Steven Holl has filled the luminous, 237,000square-foot home for modern and contemporary art with dazzling effects that play out across ceilings, walls and floors at various times of day. Happily, the actual art also asserts itself profoundly.
The whole experience unfolds across three floors and then some. Its 13 spacious galleries line a central atrium with additional display walls. There’s big art below ground and outside, too.
The breadth of what’s on view can astonish even a visitor who frequents the campus’ two older exhibition buildings. At least half of the artworks are recent acquisitions or have been stored so long they feel new. Many others have appeared only in a past show or two.
The museum needed the Kinder Building because it enjoys almost obscene resources that accelerated after 2004, when the late trustee Caroline Wiess Law bequeathed a $450 million endowment for acquiring modern and contemporary art. And the buying spree continues.
The late director Peter Marzio expanded the museum’s scope of “modern and contemporary” art to embrace Houston’s growing diversity. On his watch,
MFAH curators developed collections of photography and Latin American art from the 20th and 21st centuries that are now among the world’s finest.
“There is, of course, the story of modernism as it was developed in Europe and the Americas in the early years of the
20th century. But we’ve made a point of insisting on the Americas and not just America,” said Gary Tinterow, Marzio’s successor. “We’re very pleased to integrate works that have traditionally been segregated into the larger story of modernism as it unfolds in our galleries.”
Tinterow arrived in 2012, just as trustees hired Holl to execute a campus master plan and two new buildings. He has gunned it leading up to the grand finale of